Vol. 38, No. 18

2-18-2004
By: Susan Wittstock

Exhibit shares, preserves Buddhist culture

Professor John Huntington wasn’t trying to create a blockbuster art show when he first conceived of The Circle of Bliss: Buddhist Meditational Art, an exhibition now showing at the Columbus Museum of Art. His interest was in assembling a smaller exhibition that would highlight the spiritual significance of artwork rarely seen or understood by non-practitioners of Buddhism.
When the Columbus Museum of Art added the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a second venue, his “little” show took on a life of its own, leading to the creation of an exhibition with 150 major works of Indian, Nepalese, Tibetan, Chinese and Mongolian art accompanied by a 600-page catalog that is garnering Huntington and co-curator Dina Bangdel international accolades for their groundbreaking scholarship.
The Circle of Bliss was first exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, one of the premiere institutions for Asian art in the United States, Oct. 5, 2003-Jan. 4, 2004, and will stay at the Columbus Museum of Art through May 9. His Majesty’s Government of Nepal participated by sharing 12 national treasures, only two of which have ever been exhibited outside of Nepal. Other objects were loaned from 40 different major private and public collections from around the world.
“Exhibitions have always been organized traditionally, according to region and oldest to most recent, and presented an array of beautiful images. You don’t know how the objects are supposed to be used by the people who made them,” said Bangdel, director of special collections for the College of the Arts and former visiting assistant professor of history of art. “The point of Circle of Bliss was exactly the opposite. For the first time ever in scholarship art historians are talking about something other than style.”
“You get a mini-course in Buddhism at this exhibit,” said Huntington, professor of history of art.
As such, visitors to the exhibition are first greeted by a sign: “As the purified Adamantine-Being (Vajrasattva) you are about to enter your own heart-mind.” The art objects inside illustrate the imagined meditational steps a Buddhist practitioner follows to achieve enlightenment. Didactic panels describe the symbolism of each piece displayed, and computer graphics panels, designed by both curators and created by Huntington, illustrate the Buddhist beliefs and visualization practices in which the objects are used.
The art is often stunningly beautiful and intricate. Brightly-tinted paintings show deities embracing, surrounded by smaller figures that interact with tiny trees and flowers. Gold sculptures of Buddhas have graceful lines and ornate bases. Paintings of mandalas have patterns that fold into and out of themselves in complicated geometric shapes.
Tantric Buddhism and its imagery have often been misinterpreted by the Western audience, who look at the sexual symbolism of the art and assume the religion involved actual sexual practices. “But it all happens in the mind,” Huntington said. “It’s a meditational event. The female represents wisdom while the male represents compassion and their union represents the state of enlightenment. We’re trying to make that very clear that sexual symbolism in Buddhist art is a metaphor.
“Buddhists do not see the deities shown in the artwork as representations of sexual deities,” he said. “In spite of all this artwork and the rituals associated with it, every practitioner knows that it represents Buddhist ideals and not some external, tangible thing,” Huntington said.
Getting access to the art, and the Buddhist methodological tenets associated with them that is part of a living tradition, was a daunting challenge.
Bangdel and Huntington had to gain the trust of Buddhist priests in Nepal, often learning about aspects of their faith that have been kept secret for centuries. “We always made it clear that we are academics, and that anything that was told to us would possibly be shared,” Huntington said.
“I think that they eventually were willing to talk with us because they viewed it as a way to preserve their culture, not just to share it with the world,” Bangdel said.
So complete was the trust that Nepalese priest Badriratna Bajracharya, a spiritual leader for Nepalese Buddhists similar to the Dalai Lama for the Tibetan Buddhist community, made his first trip to the United States to see the exhibit in Los Angeles, and brought 13 of his priests with him. They conducted traditional rituals at the museum in public ceremonies.
“It was a momentous occasion for them to be in the West and to share their traditions. It was history in the making,” Bangdel said. Newar Buddhism, although it has been practiced in Nepal for 2,500 years, is rarely recognized as a center of living practices of Sanskrit Tantric Buddhism.
That is likely to change now, Bangdel said. The hardbound, four-color catalog for the Circle of Bliss exhibition is already being considered a definitive text of Buddhist art, and should go far in introducing the world to Newar Buddhism.
Huntington and Bangdel also are happy to see academic knowledge of the subjects grow a little closer to home. “For me, the best part of the catalog is that 20 of our Department of Art students were involved,” Huntington said. “For many, this was their first time to be published. When I agreed to do this exhibition, my ‘fee’ was that our students could play too. As teachers, it was very important to both of us that we were able to give them that experience.”
Ohio State, home to the John C. and Susan L. Huntington Archive of Buddhist and Related Art and its more than 300,000 photographs and slides of Asian art, is already internationally known for its Asian scholarship. Bangdel believes the university’s reputation will continue to grow. “I think this catalog will put OSU at the forefront of the field,” Bangdel said. “Any one who wants to study Buddhist art, this will be where they start.”

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